Now that the high-def format war has come to an end Sony is rolling out a couple of new Blu-ray players equipped with the latest and greatest features. The BDP-S550 and BDP-S350 look virtually identical but differ only in some of the internal extras.

Both players come with picture-in-picture which Sony is calling “BonusView”, and have BD-Live through an Ethernet port allowing the players to get firmware updates and interactive content through the intertubes. The BDP-S350 is BD-Live “ready” while the BDP-S550 ships with the feature already capable. One of the other few differences between the two is that the BDP-S550 comes with 1GB of internal storage while the other doesn’t, but both have a USB connection for additional external storage.

As for the meat and potatoes of these Blu-ray players, they feature 1080/60p and 24p True Cinema output and can play most DVDs and upscale to 1080p through an HDMI connection. They also have 7.1 channel Dolby TrueHD and digital plus sound with the BDP-S550 adding in some dts-HD High-Res audio. Sony’s shipping the new players this summer with the BDP-S330 going for $400 and the BDP-S550 retailing at $500.

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